This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene

Concept mash-up (matthew Gurney)

In Last week's activities I elaborated a little bit on some ideas I want to mash up: namely spacetime, dis-emplacement, non-places, and expanse-ness. These started from elaborations on the collapsing of space and time due to the Anthropocene as seen in the COVID and climate crises. I will now explore these further through some images.

The Polar Bear hotel in China is cruel, and we can understand why through a mash up of these concepts. the polar bears have clearly been dis-emplaced, they have been pushed into this environment and have been fixed to these surroundings. Their environment has also collapsed onto these four walls, the white floor poorly mimicking snow and ice caps squashed into the wall. Their spacetime, and how they perceive the world has literally collapsed into these walls in a grotesque way. But more interestingly is the windows: these humans have been dis-emplaced onto the polar bear "habitat", in the loosest sense of the word, as some form of immersive experience. As a result, the urban culture has collapsed onto the unnatural, natural environment, and as a result, this is a non-place, that distorts the binary of natureculture. It is difficult to imagine how these bears perceive their space.

This second image is of another collapsing of spacetime, in a different way. It is somewhere I visited in 2017, the Hong Kong botanical gardens. It is the opposite of the polar bear hotel - the plants have been dis-emplaced into the urban city, which ominously looms over it. Their natural instinct to grow and expand is limited and curated by a sprawling metropolis, in a city that ironically struggles for space. This image also makes me thing of expanse-ness, in a different way to how I originally conceived it: the gardens feel expansive, you feel like you're in "nature", and you have that feeling of safety in an open space, yet this is ultimately a state of false consciousness, there is nothing natural about it.

The last image for me is much closer to home. I tried to find better images but this one nicely sums up my lived experience. This for me is expanse-ness as how I first thought of it - the safety you have from being only 2m apart yet it feels like you do in a large open field, in that there is safety, but an emptiness, in the opened space. These are non-places, atomised as Jennifer Cooke said, each 2m apart. These places are non places, as how each desk on campus now has an allocated number where it once was apart of a a larger room, we are all atomised into our own non-places.

to conclude, I think I want to cover all these ideas as dis-emplacement. For me it implies that we have all become fixed to these new ideas of place and space during the pandemic, and while it is a new sense for us, it is how I imagine the Canadian Geese in the Oil sands and the polar bears in their hotel feel. There is an absurd truth to the idea that these collapsed liminal spaces emulate the safety of an expanse, by collapsing spacetime down into atomised chunks, creates a feeling of safety that we know is false, but have to depend on.

This page has paths:

Contents of this path:
2. Athabasca Oil Sand (Matthew Gurney) Reading the close reading in ‘Marginal Worlds’ made me think about anthropogenic environments that do not fit in the binary of nature and culture, places “caught in a sort of a halfway point between the two”. Worlds like this also exist beyond the marginal: they exist out of the limelight, where human existence, and our imaginations, do not dwell. It is as if they exist in a dark, other world, beyond anthropocentric focuses of the natureculture. The image is a flock of Canada Geese flying over a surface mine in the Athabasca, Canada oil sands. This environment is clearly unnatural and yet uninhabitable for humans too, subverting natureculture – there is no culture in this land, it is turned up and destroyed to preserve a culture that is spatially far away. The mining companies have not thought of what this means for the geese. It is hard to imagine what these birds perceive of their world, it can only to them be an uneasy, hostile expanse. These sorts of images make me think what will exist in these empty spaces, and what the significance of empty expanses like this are in the future.

This page has replies:

Polar bears are just one of a multitude of species labelled as vulnerable to the threat of climate change. Polar bears typically live in the Arctic Circle, but as their habitats shrink and their food source is depleted, they are becoming increasingly pushed from their natural environments and into areas which are hostile to them. This reflects the concept of physical geodisplacement amongst threatened species.
Matthew’s reference to the Harbin Polarland theme park and hotel in China is a harrowing reference to the geodisplacement of endangered species. By taking an animal out of its natural habitat and placing it in an artificial environment for human entertainment, we are perpetuating their vulnerable status.

The infamous theme park has sparked international conversation regarding the treatment of animals, namely, the mistreatment of threatened species. Polar bears are naturally active creatures - usually being active on an average of 18 hours a day and they typically spend half of it hunting. This life in captivity begs the question - How moral is it to profit off an animals entrapment? The hotel has crossed a line in the public’s view, being labelled as animal cruelty. Chinese wildlife protection laws have gaps which enable the exploitation of animals in medicine, circuses, zoos and hotels such as the Harbin Polarland theme park.
The Polar Bear Hotel opens up a dialogue about empathy, and questions our humanity. It depicts the physical geodisplacement of threatened species and sparks public reflection.

“China opens polar bear hotel: polar bears stuck in a stuck in small area to entertainment guests” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMZROJOquow
Academic Article for further research:
Molnár, Péter K., et al. “Predicting survival, reproduction and abundance of polar bears under climate change.” Biological Conservation, vol. 143, no. 7, 2010, pp. 1612-1622. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2010.04.004
Contents of this reply:
1. Concept mash-up (matthew Gurney) In Last week's activities I elaborated a little bit on some ideas I want to mash up: namely spacetime, dis-emplacement, non-places, and expanse-ness. These started from elaborations on the collapsing of space and time due to the Anthropocene as seen in the COVID and climate crises. I will now explore these further through some images.
  
  The Polar Bear hotel in China is cruel, and we can understand why through a mash up of these concepts. the polar bears have clearly been dis-emplaced, they have been pushed into this environment and have been fixed to these surroundings. Their environment has also collapsed onto these four walls, the white floor poorly mimicking snow and ice caps squashed into the wall. Their spacetime, and how they perceive the world has literally collapsed into these walls in a grotesque way. But more interestingly is the windows: these humans have been dis-emplaced onto the polar bear "habitat", in the loosest sense of the word, as some form of immersive experience. As a result, the urban culture has collapsed onto the unnatural, natural environment, and as a result, this is a non-place, that distorts the binary of natureculture. It is difficult to imagine how these bears perceive their space.
  
  This second image is of another collapsing of spacetime, in a different way. It is somewhere I visited in 2017, the Hong Kong botanical gardens. It is the opposite of the polar bear hotel - the plants have been dis-emplaced into the urban city, which ominously looms over it. Their natural instinct to grow and expand is limited and curated by a sprawling metropolis, in a city that ironically struggles for space. This image also makes me thing of expanse-ness, in a different way to how I originally conceived it: the gardens feel expansive, you feel like you're in "nature", and you have that feeling of safety in an open space, yet this is ultimately a state of false consciousness, there is nothing natural about it.
  
  The last image for me is much closer to home. I tried to find better images but this one nicely sums up my lived experience. This for me is expanse-ness as how I first thought of it - the safety you have from being only 2m apart yet it feels like you do in a large open field, in that there is safety, but an emptiness, in the opened space. These are non-places, atomised as Jennifer Cooke said, each 2m apart. These places are non places, as how each desk on campus now has an allocated number where it once was apart of a a larger room, we are all atomised into our own non-places.
  
  to conclude, I think I want to cover all these ideas as dis-emplacement. For me it implies that we have all become fixed to these new ideas of place and space during the pandemic, and while it is a new sense for us, it is how I imagine the Canadian Geese in the Oil sands and the polar bears in their hotel feel. There is an absurd truth to the idea that these collapsed liminal spaces emulate the safety of an expanse, by collapsing spacetime down into atomised chunks, creates a feeling of safety that we know is false, but have to depend on.

This page has paths:

This page has replies:

This page references: